----------------------------Original message----------------------------
> Date: Thu, 28 Nov 1991 09:03:54 +0100
> From: terjesa@pons.uio.no (Terje Sagvolden -- PSYC Editorial Board)
> To: harnad@Princeton.EDU
> Subject: Re:  Submitting an article to PSYCOLOQUY
>
> I expect that the following issue has been discussed before:  I am a
> little worried that researchers may be reluctant to submit articles to
> PSYCOLOQUY because copyright restricts the use of these data in a
> standard journal article and it might be difficult to explain to
> promotion and other committees what PSYCOLOQUY is. We know that
> PSYCOLOQUY is very different from other journals, with a lot of freedom
> and potential that paper-based journals never will get - scholarly
> skywriting -  but there are a lot of people who have no understanding of
> these potentials. We might therefore want to be a little flexible on
> whether or not data can be used in a later publication (copy rights). I
> am convinced that data and ideas that have been thoroughly discussed in
> scholarly skywriting will benefit articles in the standard journals.
>
> Terje Sagvolden
> PSYCOLOQUY Editorial Board: Attentional Deficits

This issue has indeed been discussed before, but it would not hurt to
summarize what has been said:

(1) PSYCOLOQUY already has a most liberal copyright policy: Authors
grant PSYCOLOQUY the right to publish, distribute electronically, and
archive and make retrievable the material accepted for publication in
PSYCOLOQUY, but they retain the copyright and may thereafter publish it
anywhere else they wish -- electronically or in a conventional paper
journal -- as long as the original PSYCOLOQUY reference is formally
acknowledged in the republication.

(On the other hand, except in very special cases, PSYCOLOQUY will not
consider for publication material that has already been published
elsewhere. This is because we wish to establish it firmly in the minds
of the members of the scholarly community that the unique "scholarly
skywriting" feature PSYCOLOQUY makes available to them is more rather
than less than what they can expect from a conventional publication,
and hence it will not be available merely as a bonus for republication
in the electronic medium of material that has previously been published
in print.)

(2) The value of refereed electronic journals will undoubtedly be
recognized and fully credited by promotion and tenure committees once
it has been clearly demonstrated to the scholarly community. During
these the formative years of this brave new medium, however, authors
whose primary motivation is career advancement are better advised to
submit to conventional journals. PSYCOLOQUY is for contributors with
particularly important ideas and findings whose primary motivation is
to advance their own research programs (and scholarly inquiry in
general) by exploiting the unique potential of scholarly skywriting in
providing rapid, global, interdisciplinary peer feedback on their work.
My prediction is that the scholarly impact of this form of publication will
eventually be seen historically to have been so incomparably greater
than anything that preceded it that the passing worries about "credit"
will turn out to have been risible.

Stevan Harnad
Co-Editor, PSYCOLOQUY